Physical Geography Fieldtrip #1


Greetings humans and otherworldly inhabitants of planet Earth.

The Physical Geography Group
As some of you might know my humans and I are currently residing in the high north in Longyearbyen, experiencing the polar day, horrendously expensive grocery prices, meeting new people and of course exploring our surroundings. Mascha has already informed you of our survival training, so I decided I will share our first fieldtrip experience.


 The trip was to the local glaciers Scott Turnerbreen, Rieperbreen and Foxfonna to gain familiarity with the surrounding geology and glaciology. Now before I continue I would like to tell you something about the naming of geological features here in Svalbard. Our current home of Longyearbyen lies in Longyeardalen, with the Longyearelva running through it and the Longyearbreen glacier at its end …. do you see what I am getting at? What a genius idea makes everything so simple and nice.

We started our fieldtrip at 10am at UNIS with all of our food, water, spare clothing, emergency rations which consisted for me of 10 chocolate bars and lots of excess energy. We travelled from UNIS by bus on a road which I and my stomach will never acknowledge as one, you can not just put dirt through a valley and call it a road. The official start of the field trip was just above the last operated coal mine here on Svalbard called Gruve 7, after exiting the bus my stomach and me praised solid ground beneath our feet.
From our starting position we walked along the edge of the mountainside looming of the valley of Bolterdalen. We could observe the two dying glaciers Rieperbreen and Scott Turnerbreen which became cold after their last surging activity. From here on the story differs, I am convinced that we walked up a steep cliff for an eternity and went further than any human before us while some people who want to hide the truth say we just walked up 500m on a small slope. Sadly due to the different accounts we will never know the truth. From our new strategical position we had a beautiful view at the before-mentioned glaciers and our upcoming route towards the Foxfonna ice cap. Walking on top of the mountains was quite an experience due to the fact that the ground we were walking on was either incredible hard frozen ground, wiggly rocks or snow. It takes a considerable amount of concentration to pick out a path you think will not make you look like a drunk, staggering mess. Another interesting observation was that apparently Norwegians have mountain-goat-like abilities that make them climb any steep surface with ease and elegance, but more in field observations need to be collected before this hypothesis can be called a fact.



Norwegians always far ahead
As we were closing in onto the ice cap the temperature became just a little bit colder which made me look for my gloves, which I forgot, so I used hiking socks instead …. don’t judge me. Walking on top of the ice cap was very nice because, as it turned out, I love the crunching sound of ice beneath my feet. On top of the ice cap we were advised to follow in the exact footsteps of our supervisor to prevent us from happily skipping into crevasses and hurting ourselves. The result of that suggestion was the formation of a long line of geology students resembling ducklings following their mother.

No, Daniel's not the mother


 Due to the uncertainty created by the crevasses we needed to make a detour to reach the lower part of Foxfonna where we were able to have a close look at the drainage channels and forming ice caves which we all look forward to explore during the dark season.




As some of you already noticed quite a lot of this trip isn’t exactly marine science related so I was quite overwhelmed in some of the aspects of glaciology, while it appeared the rest of the students have heard the terminology as often as we talked about the internal circulation of a special Scottish sea loch. So I was incredibly happy that at the end of our field day on our way back to Longyearbyen we stopped and walked towards an elevation with some particular features. After a thorough inspection with my impeccable geology skills, they revealed themselves as marine deposits with beautiful cross lamination. I never thought I would get that excited by something like this, but this is apparently what marine science withdrawal does to you.
I hope you guys enjoyed the post and I excuse myself for the late post, procrastination is a formidable opponent, See ya later humans.

Photos by Hugo Mann, Aga Nowak and Lena Rubensdotter

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